Rural Life

So many changes!

It's been an odd week, with a number of changes, so I feel a bit fuzzy with it all.  The weather has changed big time - from heat and sun to mixed, with rain, cloud, cool breezes, sometimes too cool, and unpleasantly sticky conditions from time to time.  In the past week we have had more rain than we did in the whole month of June I think!  As we are always being told to beware of providing conditions for tiger mosquitoes to breed and take hold, I was amused to see what could catch and keep rain!

Once the excitement and tiredness of the Diner Champêtre was over, I could no longer put off the day when my faithful old computer had to be turned off and the new one installed.  I procrastinated for as long as I could and hoovered all the nooks and crannies exposed by the removal of the old machine, but in the end, I had to get it out of its box and position it. 

That was when I found I had ordered a computer with a glass side!  No wonder they kept asking if I wanted to include lights in it!!  After rolling around on the floor pushing USB and other connections into the various slots at the back of the machine, it was time to press the on button. 

Quietly it sorted itself out, asked to be named, loaded up all the various updates issued since it was tested about 4 weeks ago, and tried to sort out my life in cyber world.  At this point I found I couldn't remember how to move my email files over, so had to set up the old machine again, borrowing a screen and cables from John's computer, in order to move things around properly, and find missing passwords.

I wish I could say it was all sorted, but it isn't, although most things are working, and the other issues, like loading photos onto blogs, are down to the internet connection I fear.

The change in weather has brought wind, which has done for the path between the Orchard and the Meadow.  The dead walnut tree by the gap is shedding branches which have brought down the hedge growth on either side, effectively blocking the gap.  In the autumn we will have to get in there with chainsaws and strimmers and clear it all out.  The wood will at least keep us warm this winter!

July is a funny time of year to be picking blackberries, but that is exactly what I am going to have to do tomorrow, to take advantage of the bounty of this year's crop.  It is an amazing year for fruit and it is rare to get enough blackberries to do anything worthwhile with them.  This year I will have to decide between jelly and liqueur unless we have a good, long season.

There are loads of plums around, although sadly my Victoria plums seem to have all been infested with bugs - I have yet to eat a whole plum without a bit of extra protein!  The quantities are such that we have two burping barrels going in the cellar, one for generic plums of any sort, and one purely for mirabelles.  It won't be a huge amount of product, but it is a rare opportunity to try for such a specific eau de vie.

Friday sees Vieil Baugé hosting Convivial'été - a local festival that over a period of three Fridays in the second half of July, goes around the villages.  The commune pays for a couple of reasonable and fairly local bands to turn up and provides a certain amount of kit, and the local Comité des Fêtes provides the food outlets and the bar.  Next week is our turn, for the first time in a number of years (it halted for Covid of course).  So that's going to keep me busy, before, of course, the final rush to get the float ready for the Comice in August.  It's all go!

Have a good week!

 

Reflections on Trail Cameras

It has been another strange week for us, with pretty nasty weather, friends over from the UK, a cat needing eye drops very frequently and weather that continues to depress.  While the good news is that we seem to have saved Poirot's eye, we are still on a regime of regular eye drops (two sorts, each every four hours) to shift the rather tenacious ulcer that caused the problem.

What has been going on the past couple of weeks, is that I have brought in for checks two out of the three trail cameras dotted around the Meadow and the Orchard.  I think we have had trail cameras for the past three years, and it has been a learning curve.  The first one was excellent, with a capability of checking what was on it remotely, well, about 6 feet away, and it took rechargeable batteries and was a delight.  But after about 18 months a small piece of plastic gave way, and as it was the on/off switch, it was quite an important bit of plastic, so a pity it wasn't stronger!.  Reluctantly, the supplier offered us a new one, as it was still within its two year guarantee, but as that model was no longer available, I had to go "posher".  The new one was Bluetooth and very funky, but didn't like rechargeable batteries, needed 12 AA batteries in any case, and basically blew up two SD cards.  After a lot of hassle I got that replaced, but I wasn't happy.  Instead I got a pack of three very simple trail cameras, taking rechargeable batteries, each only needing four AA batteries anyway, but with no remote or WiFi capability.

These have turned out to be excellent.  Robust, easy to understand, not overly heavy on batteries and I can put them up and leave them for 6 to 10 weeks and not worry about them.  When I bring them in for cleaning, a battery check and to download what is on the SD card, I then have a lot of work on my hands.

Assuming I have found a good place to put the camera (and that in itself is an art), I have anywhere between 200 and 2,000 files to go through and check.  I would say that between a third and a half of all files can be ditched easily - they are of my bottom walking away from the camera, or something interesting went past too fast for the camera to spring into life.

At first, I would also hang onto partial images - a fox's tail, a disappearing badger bottom, a blur of something that might be interesting.  Now I am more selective, although as with the image below, I've not a clue what it is, but it is big and interesting!

Quite often the photos are a bit blurred, although some are enchanting.  The videos take up a lot of space, and are a mixed bunch.  These badgers are lovely, but why do they have to be off to the right of the image?

Or something really interesting is going on but just a couple of metres too far away from the camera to be stunning.

Some things are nice, but could do with a bit more context.

Other captures would be really excellent if the wretched animal didn't decide to do most of what they were doing behind a tree!

Some would be great, if only the subject had decided to do the really interesting thing during daylight hours for that extra crispness.

Sometimes however, things are nearly perfect, and I could try to kid  you that they are deliberate!

And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, things work just right!  That magpie was just begging for his close up!

I know magpies aren't favourite birds, they are a bit mean and they make a lot of noise, but they act like they have characters.  I also didn't know they liked walnuts!

For anyone who is interested, the cameras are Num'axe PIE1066.  You do need an SD card reader to download the images as well, not supplied with the cameras.  Two have been attacked by deer and boar and have survived, and all have been covered in bird poo from time to time.

I hope you enjoyed the videos and have a good week.

 

End of an era, in more ways than one

So last week saw me back in England for a few days - there was family stuff to do and people to see, and a final work presentation to do.

I started off heading for Saffron Walden, via Hatfield, to see family.  Visiting Hatfield was also a bit of a blast from the past, having spent years there as a student and post-grad.  The Gateway superstore with flats above had been removed and replaced with an Asda superstore with no flats above, the shopping centre was as grim as ever, and I met a rat in an underpass.  Time hasn't been kind to Hatfield, and even the airfield where de Havilland, then BAe, used to test planes has now disappeared under brick, tarmac and concrete.

On a happier note, Saffron Walden is as pretty as ever, like a TV set town in a Midsummer Murder or similarly nostalgic show, where buildings are pretty, the population handsome, traffic diverted from where you want to be, the sun shines and plants bloom.  

I also went to Harwich - somewhere I last visited when a niece got married perhaps 25 years ago?  To get to where I needed to be, I managed to avoid the town centre, which might have disappointed, and instead just followed the A120 until it fizzled out near the Lifeboat Museum.  This is a quaint corner of town, with narrow roads, pretty houses and a view onto the estuary from nearly every point.  There is a moored up Pirate Radio ship, bringing waves of nostalgia as I remembered hours listening to Caroline or Laser 252 as alternatives to Radio 1, which never seemed to have good reception.  There was also a memorial to the Kindertransports of the late 1930s.

After a couple of nights with family, I had to move on to my main purpose of the visit - Norwich and the Broads.  Thursday saw the celebration event, drawing to a close the magnificent Water, Mills and Marshes Landscape Partnership Scheme, while also alerting partners to a new, bigger, better fund from Heritage Lottery which will kick off next year.  The presentation was held at the Norwich University of the Arts Immersive Visualisation laboratory, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others.  My rather boring and untechnical presentation was done on a normal screen with rows of chairs in traditional form.

My low tech presentation was let down by the computer mouse not advancing slides, so Farrell of the Broads Authority (see last week) had to lie on the floor and manually click the keyboard to make things happen.  As the lighting was low, I couldn't see my notes so some of the detail of the slides had to be glossed over, probably a good thing for the person on the floor. 

Once the retrospective celebration was done, people could concentrate on the exciting new stuff - the new funding opportunity and the immersive screen.  At 10 metres in diameter and 4 metres tall, the screen is amazing, and when video and audio work together, almost as good as being out there yourself, but with huge potential for exploring simulated futures as well as the past.

But planning for and evaluating the new fund and working with the immersive screen is for others younger than I.  That was my last ever evaluation project, my last ever professional presentation - unless Baugé en Anjou ever discovers what I can do, I guess, but I doubt it.  Now I turn the page on an evaluation career that lasted for 30 years, and move on to a new stage in my life, and see where that takes me!

I left Norwich with some regrets - it is a lovely city, set in a beautiful area of England, but I am not sure I will be going back.  Another quick pitstop at Hatfield reminded me why we left there in 1989 without much of a backward glance, while the tarmac purgatory that is Portsmouth Harbour positively pushed me home!

So, home again, but here too there have been changes while I was away. 

Something over 15 years ago, John took in next door's rather neglected and abused cat, Nennette.  He had her sterilised (she was a good Mum, but much better off without the wherewithal  for more), brought her into the house, had her chipped and parasites removed and her vaccinations done.  We also changed her name to Nibbles - partly because Nennette was a horrid name, and partly because in those days, if you got too close, she would bite.  Actually she never really got out of the nibbling phase, but it was done more in affection than in fear in later years. 

Six years ago she had a stoke, which left her rather deaf, and with a tendency to walk in diagonals, but did not stop her climbing walls and trees.  A couple of years ago she developed hyperthyroidism, which led to her going blind about a year ago.  On Wednesday, her heart gave out, and she left us.  

For a small cat, she had a larger than life character.  Her facial expressions were amazing - often disapproving.  She brought rats back for her kittens, which our neighbour treated with a certain horror, but we pointed out he should accept as the presents she intended them to be, and that he should feed her more!  She had a five year battle with a green woodpecker that tried to visit the garden.  She liked to taunt and goad dogs.  She liked sandalwood scented soap.

What a lot to say this week!  I have brought home a trail camera, so next week there may be a wildlife photo or two - we can but hope.  Have a good week!

 

 

Lockdown III, Day 2 - not so nice as yesterday

No sun-drenched photos today as the weather has taken a colder and duller turn, and we wait agog for some rain!  We've not had rain, proper rain, since John seeded a new lawn about 3 weeks ago - blame him!!  We had to go back to The Shack today to feed the Boys in the Country, so took some time to check the Asian Hornet trap we have there (I did write about it last year, but can't immediately find the blog).  I'd been pretty chuffed to find one critter in there on Friday last week, but today there were 3!  Nasty brutes too.  It is important to trap and kill these over-wintered queens as they have small nests dotted about, in which they are raising their fertile brood of up to a dozen future queens.  Get them now and that is up to a dozen per queen big nests full of bee eating hornets that won't happen.

We also admired, or tried to, the shallots that are starting to come up.  We were so pleased with how they grew last year, that we bought rather more this year, and there is a larger bed with 33 sets trying to do what they do.  They are hampered in that by big fluffy cats who find nicely turned, dry earth a lovely way to remove excess fur, and roll around in an abandoned fashion.  This is Donald doing his thing.

We walked the boundaries to check that all was well, and met the neighbours at the bottom of the orchard where there are a couple of small ponds.  They thought we were very interesting.

And then we admired cherry blossom along the boundary of the wild flower meadow - you can see just how different it is to the pear blossom I showed yesterday, can't you?  Sadly as it was cold, there was no comforting buzz of busy bees and no cherry blossom perfume, but that will be back later in the week with the sun.

The sun should be back tomorrow, for rather prettier pictures!